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Jose Reyes strides into the New York Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square. Fitted gray suit, black-on-black shirt and tie, designer shoes, diamond earrings, gold watch and three small notches shaved into his right eyebrow. And then there’s the beard. It’s long and stringy—half Viking, half prisoner of war. It’s like his chin is rebelling against the rest of his person’s pamperedness and he’s either not noticed or too cool to give a damn. Probably the latter.
He is, nevertheless, a little out of his element, arriving to give a speech at the 18th annual Lou Gehrig Sports Awards—a swanky benefit dinner that will raise more than $800,000 for The ALS Association’s New York chapter—along with R.A. Dickey, of all people. A hush falls over the dim ballroom as Reyes steps to the podium—after being presented with a small, diamond-shaped glass trophy by Bob Costas—to give his prepared remarks. Prominent New York lawyers, CEOs and real estate czars who forked over $2,500 a ticket strain their necks for a glimpse at 2011’s National League batting champion. “From the bottom of my heart, I am very humbled,” Reyes says, before pausing for a long breath and admitting, “I’m kind of nervous.”
Who knew Jose Reyes gets nervous? Those who have spent time with the 29-year-old know him to be both perpetually excited and buoyant about everything—a kid living out his greatest dreams. That would be an apt description of Reyes’s life if he was even able to fathom this lavish existence when his childhood head hit the mattress on a concrete floor in the tiny Dominican bungalow where he grew up—this life of expensive clothes, diamond jewellery, custom cars, private jets, enough sneakers to open a museum, a recording studio and a $3.25-million, 5,000-sq.-ft. mansion in a Manhasset, N.Y., gated community. After all, you would have needed a TV to know luxury jets even existed.
Reyes is a rare kind of ballplayer, one of the hardest to come by in the game: the defensively brilliant shortstop who can hit; the base-stealer with pop; the flashy, $20-million-a-year superstar who brings a sanguine, amiable presence to the clubhouse. If you could build a shortstop, you would build Jose Reyes, and Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos will tell you that. Reyes was his favourite player for years as he watched him from afar, rolling out season after season with nearly 200 hits and more than 60 steals. Anthopoulos did his due diligence—begrudgingly perhaps—asking scouts and league executives about Reyes’s makeup which, as the Montreal native would describe it with one of his favourite sayings, is “off the charts.” He sat idle, watching Reyes pass him by in free agency in 2011, demanding, with just cause, much more than Anthopoulos could offer. So when an opportunity arose at this winter’s GM meetings to trade for him, Anthopoulos couldn’t help himself. “I don’t know that we’re going to see another shortstop like this in Toronto for a long time,” Anthopoulos says.
But all superstars end up defined by their faults. The knock against Reyes is an injury history over his 10-year career that has seen him make five trips to the 15-day disabled list and two to the 60-day DL with ailments to his hamstrings, knees, calves and ankles. In 2009, he played just 36 games before being felled by, in succession, stiffness in his right calf, inflammation and tendinitis in his right Achilles, a torn hamstring tendon and, finally, nagging scar tissue in his right knee. He didn’t play another game that season and wound up having surgery to clean up his barnacled knee. As if things could get any worse, the following spring when he reported to Mets camp in Florida, doctors found he had an overactive thyroid and ordered him to halt all athletic activity. He started the 2010 season as he had finished his last: on the disabled list. This tangled record has caused some to question whether Reyes’s durability will be stretched to its limits over a season on the Rogers Centre turf, which is a lot like playing on concrete covered by a shag carpet. But Reyes has recommitted himself to conditioning in recent years and hasn’t been on the DL since August 2011, playing 160 games last season with the Marlins and leading the National League in plate appearances with 716.
Plus, people forget that this guy learned the game playing on rocks.
Reyes grew up in a tiny Dominican town called Palmar Arriba, a community so small the pothole-laced roads don’t even have names. When Reyes was young, no one from Palmar Arriba had ever made it to the majors. And who could, with just one derelict baseball diamond in town for kids to play on? To call the park unkempt would be generous; the outfield was more stone than grass and the walls would crumble if it rained too much. But Reyes was there as often as he could be, making the five-minute hike from his parents’ house, sometimes riding there on a donkey. Even from a young age, Reyes was always the flashiest kid on the diamond, relishing every opportunity to leg out a triple or make an acrobatic play at short, often bare-handed or with a milk carton because his family couldn’t afford to buy him a glove. Of course, baseball wasn’t particularly organized or well-coached in Palmar Arriba, so Dominican scouts never bothered to check in, preferring to stick to the city centres. That’s why no one even truly understood just how good the 13-year-old Reyes was until the coach of a team visiting from nearby Santiago de los Caballeros told Reyes’s father, Jose Manuel, that he should get his son to the big cities where scouts could watch him play.
Reyes spent the next three years playing all over the Dominican Republic and taught himself to hit from both sides of the plate on the advice of his father, who heard scouts were looking for switch hitters. Jose Manuel and his wife, Rosa, fed the young Reyes as well as they could and tried to give him everything he needed to pursue his dreams but the family’s income was meagre—the bulk of it coming from Jose Manuel’s factory job building toilets—so when Reyes finally earned a tryout with the Mets in Santiago de los Caballeros, he weighed just 130 lb. and had nothing but battered old equipment. His slight stature deterred many a scout, but what set Reyes apart was his unmistakable energy and tenacity. He hustled after every ball hit his way and concentrated intensely when taking his swings in the batting cage. Plus, he moved seamlessly and naturally at short, executing every play with an ease and composure that eluded many of his peers. The Mets decided to take a chance—a rather low-risk one—offering Reyes a $22,000 bonus to sign with the team and report to Kingsport, Tenn., for rookie ball. Reyes giddily accepted and, as the second-youngest player on the team at just 16, played 49 games for Kingsport in 2000, more than any other shortstop on the roster. He gave half his bonus to his parents and his uncle, who used it to build a bodega in front of their home on a winding dirt road in Palmar Arriba. They sold plantains, corn and sweet potatoes grown on farmland Reyes also purchased for them.
By the time he was 23, Reyes had more money than he ever dreamed, signing an extension with the Mets that would pay him $33.75 million over five years, a deserved reward following his first full season with New York, during which he played in all but one game and led the NL in triples and stolen bases. Over the next three seasons, he accumulated 18.3 wins above replacement, more than any other major-league shortstop, and posted an .816 OPS, a welcome rate of production from a primarily defensive position. Reyes rewarded himself with the usual thrills of a young ballplayer finally making bank: clothing, cars, jewellery. He also started a record label, EL7 Music, as a way to explore his interest in making reggaeton music and, maybe more importantly, employ his friends. Aside from a few songs available on iTunes, it doesn’t seem like EL7 Music makes much money. But Reyes has no plans to stop bankrolling the operation. “I still have a couple other friends from the Dominican that I want to help out,” he says. “That’s why I do it.”
When he’s home, Reyes leaves the spoils of his new life behind, ditching the flashy jewellery and fitted suits, opting instead for basketball shorts, a tank top and a ball cap. He casually reverts to the poor baseball-loving kid he once was, running up hills with his buddies for exercise before jogging home for Rosa’s famous chicken with rice and playing dominoes in the sun.
Reyes has directed much of his money back to Palmar Arriba. He bought his parents even more land and properties for close childhood friends. He financed a renovation of his home ballpark, replacing the gravel and rocks that Reyes played on with plush grass and infield dirt, and reinforcing the crumbling walls. He also helped organize the town’s baseball league, which quickly signed up 150 kids; Reyes outfitted all of them with cleats, bats and gloves. This winter, when he visited his family for the holidays, he stopped by the ballpark to play catch and hand out 150 Blue Jays jerseys. “I see those kids and they remind me of me,” Reyes says. “I used to be like that. So now I’m somebody who can help them because nobody ever helped me.” Reyes also gave away hundreds of Christmas baskets packed with food and clothes to some of the town’s poorer residents who lined up in heavy rain to get their hands on one. A few thousand dollars on a necklace, a few thousand on food for the poor. They do say life is supposed to be about balance.
Five days after his speech at the Marriott in New York, Reyes woke up at 6 a.m. in Dubai—where he was vacationing with his wife, Katherine—to a scenic view of the Persian Gulf and an iPhone full of texts telling him he’d been traded. He didn’t believe it; it had to be a joke. So he called his agent, Peter Greenberg, who was 13,000 km away in San Francisco. “Well,” Greenberg’s voice crackled over the phone, “we didn’t want to bother you while you’re on vacation.” Turns out the night after the Lou Gehrig Awards, while Reyes was out dining with Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria in New York, Marlins GM Larry Beinfest was meeting with Anthopoulos in Indian Wells, Calif., working on a deal to unload Reyes and the $96 million left on his contract. Loria was keeping Reyes busy; Beinfest was busy not keeping Reyes.
This can be a cold business. Reyes hasn’t heard from Loria since that night in New York. “That’s OK,” Reyes says with a dismissive glance. “I don’t want him to call me anyway.” Reyes is in Toronto now, cycling through the pictures from his trip to Palmar Arriba on his iPhone while reclining on a couch and waiting patiently for a radio interview to begin. Despite Loria urging him to settle his family nearby, Reyes never laid roots in Miami, calling off the house hunt he and his wife were on at the beginning of the 2012 season. “I don’t know why we kept putting it off,” Reyes says. “Maybe something told me, ‘You know, you’re not going to be here.’”
Well, something could have told him he wouldn’t be here 15 years ago in that tiny Dominican town that had never sent anyone to the majors. And here he is. Reyes has done more than anyone could have expected to improve on the place he came from. His parents live comfortably now; his friends have jobs making music; scouts go to games at the refurbished ballpark in Palmar Arriba—10 players from the town have signed pro contracts in the past five years. And he has settled much of the future, too, as he soon turns 30 and starts the stretch run of his career making $22 million a year in a new city desperate for a World Series. So maybe we can excuse Reyes for living in the moment. It’s hard to think about tomorrow when there’s so much going on today.
Arden Zwelling is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine